No-knock = License to Kill
[Warning: Angry Post]
On November 21, Atlanta cops serving a no-knock warrant gunned down 88-year-old African American (of course) Kathryn Johnston in her own home. The controversy now is about whether or not a police informant set up the warrant, or was told to lie about it afterwards.
Franky, I couldn’t give two shits. We already know that cops lie all the time to cover up their own criminal activities.
The other bone of contention is that Kathryn Johnston fired at them with a .38 caliber pistol. Again, I don’t care… not in the way it’s being framed anyway.
What the no-knock warrant does is gives the cops the legal right to break into your house without announcing themselves. They say it’s necessary to protect the cops.
Here’s my straight line to the point.
Cops take on risk when they take the job, ostensibly to put themselves between the public and danger (I don’t believe this for one minute, but that’s the conventional fairy tale.).
One reason I can’t claim pacifism is my firm belief in the right to self defense. Kathryn Johnston never volunteered to take a bullet to protect the fucking police from some hypothetical danger.
From her point of view, and the point of view of others to which this has happened, like Ismael Mena in 1999, they are sitting at home minding their own goddamn business, when a bunch of unannounced people start smashing down their doors.
Ismael Mena and Kathryn Johnston, in my humble opinion, have every right to shoot violent intruders breaking into their homes.
What no-knock warrants say is, no they don’t. And when the cops — who routinely use rats and snitches as their highly reliable sources — can kill you for defending yourself, because they need to live out their SWAT fantasies to imprison people for using dope (it would be cheaper and safet to just decriinalize it), then the right to self defense is a thing of the past.
No-knock warrants are just a license to kill for the cops.
becca:
Saw this piece first over at HuffPO. This kind of “Clockwork Orange” stuff is becoming much more common, don’t you think.
I sure hope I have my camera ready to roll if I ever get pulled over for anything.
Look forward to reading more of your stuff. According to what your bio says, you certaily have walked the talk, and I appreciate your service to our country, and to promote peace.
30 November 2006, 9:34 pmNamaste,
becca
DeAnander:
happened to a colleague of mine some years back. peaceful evening at home with wife and child, reading, talking, then suddenly pounding footsteps outside, door kicked in, SWAT/BATF team with rifles levelled (in a remote mountain home), threats barked, “get down on the floor NOW” etc. never any clear explanation, “an anonymous tip” was received claiming his house was a drug lab house. ironically he was a teetotaller, a devout christian who spent every xmas vacation helping to build affordable housing in Mexico. he had no guns in the house. he thought that perhaps it was mischief from a hostile neighbour w/whom there had been some slight friction over car parking and loud partying. cost of repairing the door came to a couple of hundred and was there any reparation? are you kidding? he declined to take it to court because of the enormous expense and hassle and for fear of ongoing reprisals. he was white. his wife and adopted daughter were Peruvian.
I’m not sure we can really defend ourselves from stormtrooper stuff like this on a case by case basis. the cops have the training and the body armour and the firepower. how many guns and how many shooters would you have to have on alert to “win” an encounter of this kind? every house a Waco? the whole idea of the no-knock warrant is totalitarian, part and parcel of the attack on habeas corpus, posse comitatus, the Miranda decision and all the other guarantees of citizen/resident rights…
it makes me feel ill.
30 November 2006, 10:12 pmDeAnander:
afterthought. if my colleague had been Black would he still be alive?
30 November 2006, 10:14 pmAngelo:
So, this is the police and facist nation we live which mainstream media and people do not want to admit..Of course the cops lied about it.
1 December 2006, 10:20 amAngelo:
LIED ABOUT DOING THIS IN SELF DEFENCE
1 December 2006, 10:28 amWinston Warfield:
I live in what’s considered a dangerous neighborhood in Boston (Dorchester), by choice. To drive home the point, I slowed for a crime scene last night (yellow tapes, the works), on an errand not three blocks from my house, with my 14-year-old boy in the van, to be shocked by a boy’s bicycle and a strewn bookbag (the ambulance had already carried its grim cargo away), behind police tape on the street. Judging from the behavior of the police (swarming), this wasn’t your garden-variety auto incident, but another youth shooting in an escalating street war we’ve been having. Home invasions as well hit the news from time to time. Now I ask you (rhetorically), what am I supposed to do if some bastards knock down my front door unannounced? I have a wife and two boys. Currently I do not have a weapon readily at hand not because I’m against guns, but because I don’t want accidents, but what if I did? I wouldn’t know it’s the po-po on a bum tip. This is outrageous. Whatever happened to the Bill of Rights?
1 December 2006, 12:19 pmLegume Sam:
This article on Alternet has gotten a lot of interesting responses — one of them is from a soldier who claims that he swore an oath to “defend the constitution,” and who objects to the advocacy of desertion on the following grounds:
Now, if we really don’t have constitutional rights, then how is fighting in the Armed Forces an act of “protecting the Constitution”?
1 December 2006, 7:08 pmRhisiart Gwilym:
My sympathy to all US citizens struggling to deal with this consternating reality. At least it’s not (quite) that bad here in Britain yet. Although there was the recent police murder of Jean Charles de Menezes just recently, an innocent Brazilian living in London and working for his living. No reparation to the family. No perpetrators brought to justice, though witnesses told the media they watched the police thugs emptying a gun into the unarmed, unresisting man’s head as he lay on the floor.
Just the usual game of our gangster rulers: wait, stall, stonewall, let the anger and the memory run into the sand, and carry on doing it when it suirs you.
The difference between your “democrany” and our “democracy” is that we never had a written constitution and bill of rights. Doesn’t seem to make much difference though. When the gangsters-in-charge want to piss all over us, they do anyway, in both countries. Despite being more determinedly pacifist than Stan, I do agree that nothing short of armed resistance - efficiently done - seems to slow the state thugs down lately.
Commiserations!
2 December 2006, 6:19 amFire Witch:
“Injustice is not anonymous. It has a name and an address.” Berthold Brecht
2 December 2006, 11:03 amRandy Morris:
An interesting essay on Counterpunch from William Lind, “Boomerang Effect…” http://www.counterpunch.org/lind12062006.html
“Last week, one of my students, a Marine captain, asked whether I had heard a news report about an “IED-like device” supposedly found near Cincinnati, and if I thought we would soon start seeing IEDs here in the U.S. I replied that I had not heard the news story, but as to whether we would see IEDs here at home, the answer is yes…”
I have problems with the (typically Conservative) racially divisive undertones, but I think his technical prediction may be on the money.
Something to consider…let me know if I am missing nuance somewhere.
Randy
7 December 2006, 2:00 pmRandy Morris:
Photo: http://www.cpoy.org/61/winners/C61-01-CookJ-01.jpg
Believe it or not, there was a time when people would have doubted a picture like this could have been taken in America. No one would believe it — probably some third-world despot or Eastern European dictatorship.
In fact, it was taken in Durham, North Carolina by a college photojournalist, and recently won in the “Spot News” category of the College Photographer of the Year competition.
Here’s the description:
A member of the Durham Police Department Selective Enforcement Team escorts a child to use the bathroom after serving a search warrant at a suspected drug house. Working closely with the police department’s Gang Units, SET is responsible for making high-risk entries into dwellings to serve search warrants. Gang Unit Two made two controlled buys, or drug purchases, from the home with the help of an informant, giving them probable cause for a search warrant.
http://www.theagitator.com/archives/027315.php
12 December 2006, 5:28 pmSks:
It won’t stop until they kill a rich white man.
The chance being so close to zero, they are statistically insignificant.
Now, in terms of “protecting police” that is disingeneous by one more reason: any midsized police deparment today has a nicely equipped, well-trained, and well paid Special Weapons and Tactics team. Any big urban area liek Atlanta has and even bigger one.
There are two explanations: one that cops when pressed will admit, the other more conspirational.
The first is money, which bears a long-ass pedantic explanation.
SWAT teams today, in the post Waco world are trained to de-scalate situations or end them tactically via non-lethality. (This is not compassion, but scientifically devised ways of asserting power, much in the style of the “sophisticated” interrogation techniques now used that stop short of torture.)
But their key advantage is the use of overwhelming manpower and intelligence to overcome supects. Both of these things require large amounts of manpower, which usually gets to be overtime for everyone, as the rigorous trainign schedule must be met.
So SWAT teams are expensive to mantain, but even more expensive to use operationally. SO using them to serve high-risk, but unimportant warrants like getting a smalltime hustler with a couple Gs worth of pot and coke is way too expensive.
Yet the alternative is to send a squad car or two into a situation that could escalate. Beat cops and detectives lack the training and overwhelming numbers that give SWAT their advantage. So when they go at it, they go at it full of fear and uncertainity.
And few things this side of an angry elephant are as dangerous as an fearful person with a gun.
Then there is a tactical truism: surprise is the best advantage.
Mix all of these factors: cost-savings for not using SWAT or training and equiping beat cops and detectives to be better tacticians, the potential political liability of trigger happy cops drunk on fear and adrenaline, and the tactical advantage of surprise.
No-Knock Warrants are a no brainer to mayors very where. Save money, save embarrasment, and save the day.
Problem is, they count on unsavory figures (which the “public” will ignore if they get killed) being behind the doors. Not 88 year olds with great shooting skills (I mean, she got multiple shots on all of them at ranges and in a situation even trained people with great sights have some problems getting just one in).
The more conspirational view also relates to money, but this time to the corrupting influence of drug money on police forces. A No-knock warrant is a perfect ruse for getting away with evidence: it is presumed to be a chaotic situation with a fluent crime scene. The same standards of evidence handling that apply to slower, more deliberate forms of arrest and search are absent.
And do not understimate this motive. Stolen drug money is the preffered way for many cops to get that boat, build that pool, and put the nerdy one in college.
Causes are ultimately irrelevant as the truth is No-Knock warrants are enabled by the same racist enviroment that create DWB and other forms of Neo-Jim Crow.
However, they also show that racism is also result as much as a cause…
BTW the photo mentioned by The Agitator has been removed from the CPOY site AND the page with the photos says that it was removed, alomg with its caption on request by the photograpaher. Someone either got shamed, or is crying “censorship by loudmoth liberals”.
16 December 2006, 6:18 amcooking4two:
Don’t forget the fact that many no-knock warrants (including the one that lead to Ms. Johnson’s death, I believe) are done by plain-clothed cops. How scary to have men dressed in street clothes, breaking into your home after dark and screaming unintelligibly at you.
31 March 2007, 11:11 am